


What's Left

by robberreynard



Category: overwatch
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, and thats about it, genji is smol and ready to fight and cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 01:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11544492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robberreynard/pseuds/robberreynard
Summary: When Genji first arrives in Nepal, he hasn't truly mended





	What's Left

The brothers’ gazes chill him the first time he enters the monastery, and every day he spends on the mountaintop feels colder and emptier than the last. He feels restless, his legs bounce when he tries to join them in meditation, and he’s acutely aware of each featureless omnic face that turns in his direction. Some get close enough that he catches glimpses of his own reflection, of his scars and the lines in his skin where bones have been replaced by metal. He avoids looking at any of them directly.

They tell him he should embrace the machinery that keeps his heart beating. That he is one step closer to enlightenment, one step closer to shedding his mortal trappings. Some part of him wants to tear them apart. Its irrational, and more violent than he ever cared to be, and he knew they didn’t deserve it, but anger was a sensation that made him feel human. It might have been all the humanity left in him. He clung to it, held on to that little ball of fire somewhere in his chest, as much as it pained him, as much as it burned, as much as it felt like he would be swallowed up in the flames and crumble to ash some days.

On one of those days he slashes a straw dummy across the chest, imagining it’s one of the brothers and instantly hates himself the moment the thought crosses his mind. They did nothing to deserve his hatred, had been nothing but kind, but god, did he hate. He wasn’t even sure if he hated them. He just hated. He hacks at the figure of wood and straw ferociously, chipping bits of the strawman’s skeleton off with every blow, until he felt a roar escape his chest and cut him down with a final sword stroke. A head, arm, and part of the dummy’s chest were all that remained in the pile of straw strewn across the courtyard. Its face was as empty as the monks that move away when his gaze falls on them. Bits of straw kick up in the wind and scatter over the railing to drift down the mountain.

He imagines how easy it would be to follow suite as he peeks over the edge to the cloud tops below.

“Nothing that can’t be fixed.” Startled by the voice, he whipped around to see one of the omnics setting the shattered strawman back on his post. Zenyatta the others called him, though it was almost impossible to tell most of them apart. They’d really only spoken in passing. Why he decided to approach at such an inopportune time, Genji could only guess.

With some effort and a little bit of stripped burlap twined around the wood, the strawman stands once more. “There,” Zenyatta said with just a hint of something close to pride, “isn’t that better?”

Genji slashes through the wraps keeping the strawman upright with ease as he walks by. This time he repairs it with the sash from his robes, and Genji hesitates when he goes to cut through it again.

“It is just straw and wood.”

“And you are only flesh and blood. That does not mean you are not worth trying to fix.” He pulls the knot tight and the mechanisms in his wrist whir softly when he pats the mended pole.

“So you’re someone else wanting to fix me. That’s all it takes right? You pull it back together and everything is fixed.”

“Human and omnic are more complex. Only the naive would believe mending the form would heal the soul within.” His voice is so calm, he speaks of these things with such ease. All of them speak in cryptic poetry about inner peace as if its so easy. It must be for an omnic. They could just have easily mistaken a glitch in their subroutines as attaining a soul. He feels that hatred bubbling in his gut and without thinking, his blade comes to rest against Zenyatta’s throat. Its not really a throat because he didn’t really inhabit a body. Just wires and metal.

“How easy would it be to mend your form, do you think? If I cut you to ribbons, could your brothers fix you?”

“They would certainly try. The Shambali only wish to mend.” He tents his fingers. “Would killing me make you feel better?”

His grip on the blade tightens. “It couldn’t make me feel worse.”

“Then by all means, go ahead. If death has plans to accept me today, I have no fear.”

He wants someone, one bot in this entire place, to react. He wants to know they feel something, that they are capable of feeling things because it means someday he’ll feel something besides this anger and hatred boiling under his skin. But they don’t. None of them feel anything because machines don’t feel. His anger really is all the humanness he has left. 

Heart throbbing in his ears, he whips the blade away from Zenyatta’s throat, clutching the sides of his pounding head. “You don’t fear death because you’re nothing but a machine! You don’t know fear! You don’t even understand the concept of pain, nothing is inside you but wires and code designed by men who thought they understood-”

“Are you in pain, Genji?”

“Of course I’m in pain!” The dam breaks and douses the flames inside him. What he’d been holding back, what had been pressing harder and harder against the back of his skull, finally comes bursting through the cracks that had spread into fissures in the walls he’d built in his mind. All of it comes rushing out and he can’t stop the few tears that spill over. A wind whips through the monastery’s courtyard and stings his face. He’s grateful for every bit of pain if it reminds him of the parts of him that are still human.

“My father died,” he goes on, “and my own brother hardly gave me time to mourn him before he decided I was a liability to the clan and tried to kill me. The people who promised to help me used me, never even gave me a choice. Twisted me into… into this. As if I was no better than a rat to be experimented on. Less than a rat.” Zenyatta hasn’t spoken. He expected him to preach about how they had his best interests at heart, or that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, or that Angela must have cared about him to heal him, but he doesn’t. The silence weighs on him with each second until he can no longer let it be. “I have nothing.” Its all he can think to say and yet saying it drains everything from him. He feels hollow. The anger is gone and with it went everything else.

“There is not a soul alive in this world that has nothing.” He gestures to the training dummy. “Even our friend here has his place and his purpose.” He made a broad sweep towards the sky and the clouds that grew thin this high up. “Each soul that realizes their place within the Iris can see the beauty of the world clearly. They can appreciate it because they know what its like to be blind to the grace around them. We know the beauty of this world because we have seen it ravaged by the ugliness of war. But it passed, as it always does. Just as you have known heartache, one day you will know happiness. When the ugliness passes, you will once more know beauty.”

Genji’s hands twist against his stomach. “When. When will it pass…”

“I cannot say. I can only promise that it will.” Zenyatta’s hand touches the flesh of his arm and the cold makes him shudder, but its bracing, and sets his nerve endings ablaze. Its painful and invigorating. “Human, omnic, between, beyond- we are all one. Without us the brilliance of the Iris dims, and the people grow blind.”

He takes a deep breath, feels the crisp air fill his lungs, cold enough to sting his throat, and he embraces the sensation. He doesn’t feel right. Would not feel right for some time. But for once he doesn’t feel that heat in the bottom of his chest. He feels warm. He opens his mouth to speak, to say what exactly, he isn’t sure. The loud clatter of the straw dummy hitting the ground makes him jolt.

Zenyatta stares down at the mess of wood. “…My place in the Iris is not that of a carpenter.”

For the first time in a lifetime, Genji laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of those fics I can't tell if I like or not and also I'm fully aware most of my work is aggressively sad I'm sorry


End file.
